COP28: Tinubu will sack officials ‘hanging around hotels’ in Dubai — Presidency

• Tinubu emphasized during a cabinet meeting that any official traveling merely to “lounge around hotels” would face severe sanctions, possibly leading to dismissal from their position
  

  ---

The presidency has issued a strict warning that any appointee discovered to have traveled to Dubai for the ongoing UN Climate Change Conference (COP28) without valid justification will face dismissal by President Bola Tinubu.

According to Chief Ajuri Ngelale, the president’s media adviser, Tinubu explicitly cautioned appointees against attending COP28 as delegates unless they could provide a clear and justified agenda for their participation.

Tinubu emphasized during a cabinet meeting that any official traveling merely to “lounge around hotels” would face severe sanctions, possibly leading to dismissal from their position.

Ngelale reaffirmed the president’s directive, emphasizing it amidst inquiries regarding the size of Nigeria’s delegation at the climate summit.

“Before we left for Dubai COP28, the Monday before we left at the Federal Executive Council meeting, today’s the end of the meeting, President Bola Tinubu turned on his microphone and he said to everybody in the room including myself that he has issued a prior warning to the entire executive leadership across the Federal government of Nigeria, that if you do not have any business to conduct on behalf of the Federal government of Nigeria in any of these major summits, you have no business using taxpayers money to finance your trip and logistics to that location,” Ngelale told TVC.

“Before UNGA, the UN General Assembly in September, we issued a statement from the presidency where the President made it very clear that not only was he massively pruning down the numbers that has initially been presented to him with respect to the Federal delegation to UNGA but he also issued a warning at that if anybody going on these trips who has no business going on these trips, they will be sanctioned. That was September. Fast word to the Monday before we left for COP28, the President said it again.

“He said that this time, I am issuing to all of you a final warning, anybody that is going to these trips to just hang around hotels or convention centers, with no articulated programme of participation at COP28, if I find out that this is what it is, I am telling you today that your jobs are on the line’. This is what he said days before we went to COP28. It was never made public. I am making it public now.”

While the government had said it sponsored only 422 out of 1,411 Nigerian participants, some critics have argued that the taxpayer-funded contingent was still large.